On Poetry Quotes

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

I have nothing to say. And I am saying it. That's poetry.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose.

How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.

Poetry is when you talk to yourself.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

Poetry is the voice of the soul, whispering, celebrating, singing, even.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.

I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.